The following is the transcript of the
workshop paper presented by SHEILA JEFFREYS at the
Symposium on Stopping the Traffic in Women for Sexual
Exploitation.

Regulating Prostitution to End
the Traffic in Women

THERE has been a surprising development
in the 1990s whereby trafficking in women for prostitution
has been de-linked from prostitution. There's been the
development of this idea that somehow prostitution itself
can be separated off as a separate area - a 'protected
zone' so that trafficking for prostitution is a problem
but prostitution itself is not a problem. What I suggest
to you in this paper is that actually the first cause of
the trafficking in women for prostitution, is prostitution
- and the first cause of prostitution is men's privilege
in systems of domination to feel that they have and can
buy the right to enter the bodies of women and children at
will. Therefore I find it very difficult to talk about
trafficking of women into prostitution without mentioning
male domination and the construction of that masculine
privilege. Although I do know that it's polite not to
mention the connection, and it's particularly polite in
Australia not to mention it, because we have a system of
legalised prostitution in Victoria and in many states
within Australia.

Those of you who are from Victoria are
probably aware that brothel prostitution was legalised in
1984 and that the idea and understanding at the time was
that legalisation would control and decrease the illegal
sex industry in Victoria. That didn't happen. Presently
there are about 100 legal brothels and, according to the
adult industry association, there are 300 illegal brothels
in Victoria - which is extraordinary in a system of
control that was established to regulate and decrease the
illegal trade.

And, as we heard today, trafficked
women are actually sold into legal brothels and of course
they are also sold into the 300 illegal brothels that
exist in Victoria. So I would suggest that there is a
problem with the system of regulation of prostitution in
this state. It does look as if it is not the best form of
regulation of prostitution to deal with trafficking.

Victoria legalised prostitution very
early, but there is now a push on to legalise prostitution
in many countries of the world as a result of the pressure
of sex industrialists and free market economics. Free
market economics - as we've been hearing today, can sell
anything, including the insides of women's bodies. The
underlying philosophy of free market economics is liberal
individualism. All this fuels legalisation. I think that
there's a weariness about how to deal with the
acknowledged very serious harms to women as a result of
prostitution. They're becoming so clear, they're becoming
so many and the industry and the harms are becoming so
horrific on a global scale that I think people are just
demoralised into thinking that there is simply nothing we
can do about it.

So, I'll start with a bit of history.
In my book "The Idea of Prostitution", I talk about the
feminists who worked between the two world wars through
the League of Nations against the trafficking of women.
The end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries was the
first time the trafficking of women was really recognised
as a problem. The shape of trafficking was in some ways
different from what is happening now. Trafficking at that
time was a result of the developments in transport; the
steam ship for instance was important, there were pogroms
- Jewish women escaping from pogroms being wrapped up in
rolls of carpet and trafficked to Buenos Aires, and
Russian women were being trafficked into China after the
famine in Russia in 1921. There were particular factors at
that time that led to particular groups of women being
trafficked.

Amazingly, trafficking was actually
included in the peace settlement, The Treaty of
Versailles, after the first World War, through which the
League of Nations was set up. It was remarkable that there
was such concern at the time about the trafficking in
women. It really shows the size of the problem. A
committee, chaired by a woman, was set up on the
trafficking in women - the title was later changed to
trafficking in persons - and feminists worked through this
committee for 20 years. The result of that work was the
construction of the 1949 United Nations Convention against
the Trafficking of Persons and the Exploitation of the
Prostitution of Others.

The result of their work, because it
was delayed by the second world war, was eventually a
United Nations Convention. Australia did not sign it, the
Netherlands did not sign it, the U.K. did not sign it. And
a main reason that these countries did not sign it, was
that it did not actually say that the definition of
trafficking required the element of force. The framers of
that Convention understood that whether women knew what
the traffickers intended for them on arrival or not, the
conditions into which they were delivered would be harsh
i.e. not speaking the language, under control and violence
of traffickers with nowhere to turn, so that 'consent' was
not crucially important. Interestingly, we have just got a
definition through the Protocol on Trafficking of the
United Nations Convention on Transnational Organised crime
(2000) where, once again as in the 1949 Convention, the
demonstration of force is not required. We've come to that
point 50 years later where we've now got a new definition
of trafficking in a UN Convention which I think is going
to be very helpful to those who are fighting the traffic
in women.

What is interesting about the work of
feminists in those 20 years through the League of Nations
was that they did huge research projects on trafficking
and concluded that brothel prostitution was fundamental to
the trafficking of women. They said that brothels were
used to warehouse the trafficked women. They were stored
in the brothels and used in the brothels on route; very
much like what Liz Kelly was talking about today. So
brothel prostitution was crucial. Therefore the 1949
Convention not only says that prostitution in general is
against the dignity of women, but also that brothel
prostitution specifically must be outlawed. And it was to
be outlawed through the prosecution of the exploiter who
owned the brothels. There was no criminalising of the male
customers in that convention, or of the prostituted women.
So really the systems of regulation of prostitution were
fundamental to the construction of that Convention. It was
understood by those feminists working against trafficking
that brothel prostitution was totally implicated in the
trafficking of women and was fundamental to the
continuance of that trafficking. That led to a Convention
to outlaw brothel prostitution.

In the 1950s and 60s brothel
prostitution was indeed outlawed in many countries,
particularly in France, which had been particularly
resistant on this issue. In India of course, Ghandi was
involved in working against brothel prostitution in India.
So the eradication of brothels was understood in the 50s &
60s to be a government responsibility.

The picture changed. It changed
particularly in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s with several
developments taking place. I suggest to you that one of
the developments was the sexual revolution which is
actually founded on the values of the sex industry. The
sexologists developed their understanding of what is
women's pleasure and how sex should be done from the sex
industry. Masters and Johnson did research with
prostituted women who were hired to get erections in
drunken men who were otherwise impotent. Our understanding
of sex is developed out of the sexual revolution. It came
from the sex industry and from pornography. Many
sexologists talked about going into the brothels and what
they learned from the brothels.

So that's where a sexual revolution
understanding of sexuality came from. The sexual
revolution normalised prostitution and the sex industry as
simply being what 'sex' was. In the 1980s and 1990s there
was a big push from the developing global sex industry to
normalise and legalise prostitution and brothel
prostitution. In 1998 the International Labour
Organization published a report called "The Sex Sector" on
prostitution in 5 Asian countries and they pointed out
that at that time the prostitution industry economically
was responsible for 2 to 14% of the gross domestic product
in those countries. The ILO report "The Sex Sector" was
basically saying, "you can't fight it, it's an important
economic sector, we simply have to accept this". So we've
now got the International Labour Organization, which is a
human rights organisation, taking the position that
prostitution is a perfectly ordinary economic sector. We
have come a long way from the earlier understandings of
the problems of trafficking for prostitution.

What happened in the 1990s is that some
NGOs and some UN personnel sought to separate trafficking
from prostitution, as we were told today. Some people said
"it should come under people smuggling". Some people said
we should "talk about the trafficking of everybody", and
"prostitution is just one of those things and we don't
need to specifically mention it". But of course we do need
to specifically mention it, because it is the actual
insides of women's bodies that are being entered in
prostitution. And I think it is different from the garment
trade, for example. I think there are a lot of differences
between trafficking for prostitution and trafficking for
the garment trade.

What can we do about it? There's been
this big campaign to separate off trafficking from
prostitution so that we don't look at the system of
regulation of prostitution. Particularly in Victoria we're
not supposed to do so. But we have legalised brothel
prostitution here and that system leads to increased
trafficking.

I'd like to give you a couple of
examples of other countries where they use different
systems of regulation to see if whether they may offer
some alternative models. In the Netherlands until 2 years
ago there was de facto legalisation of brothels. Brothels
were not officially legalised but the prostitution
industry was very much accepted and normalised in the
Netherlands. The vast majority of women in the windows in
Amsterdam and in brothel prostitution in Amsterdam are
trafficked women.

It is in fact out of the Netherlands
that, interestingly enough, the most significant
ideological push to get prostitution recognised as simply
work, as simply choice, and separate it from trafficking,
has come. In the Netherlands, the concern about
trafficking led to the formal legalisation of brothels
which took place in 2000. Behind it was the idea that
trafficking was pulling down the wages and the conditions
of women from the Netherlands in prostitution.

What seems to have happened as a result
of the actual formal legalisation of brothel prostitution,
which says that those who work in brothels must have work
permits for the Netherlands, is that brothel prostitution
is being restricted to citizens. The trafficked women
cannot be in the brothels any more. And the brothel owners
are very cross because they cannot get enough women to
sell. The trafficked women have been reduced to working in
street prostitution where they are very much more under
the control of their pimps and receive more abuse and
violence as a result. So though in theory it was a
development that was actually going to help deal with the
problem of the traffic in women, to reduce the numbers
that are trafficked, it has not achieved that. The
trafficked women are put into different contexts such as
carparks on the outskirts of the city which have become
tolerated zones for street prostitution with men queuing
up in their hundreds to abuse them. They are more
exploited and more vulnerable than they were in the
brothels themselves. So restricting brothel work to
certain nationalities does not necessarily reduce
trafficking. There needs to be a reduction in men's
prostitution behaviour. Men's demand to use women needs to
be decreased.

Sweden has a very different approach.
Liz Kelly mentioned this earlier. The Swedish model, which
is likely to be followed by other countries in
Scandinavia, was developed in a country in which women
have 50% of the places in Parliament and women have more
formal equality than in any other country probably in the
world. I'm not suggesting to you that formal equality is
the answer. After all where there's a man and a woman in a
marriage, there's one of each, they're exactly equal, but
it's the woman who gets bashed. So formal equality does
not necessarily help us; 50% does not necessarily help us
either. But in theory, in Sweden they are in a better
position. And the influence of women there has led to the
Violence Against Women Act which came into effect in 1999
in which prostitution was defined as an aspect of violence
against women. As a result, in that legislative regime,
men are committing an offence if they are buying sexual
services. There have only been something like, when I was
there earlier this year, about 37 prosecutions, so not a
great deal.

Does it make a difference to the
traffic in women? My understanding from women in the
Ministry for Gender Equality in Sweden now that, as a
result of that legislation, traffickers are dissuaded from
trafficking women into Sweden simply because it's so much
more difficult. There are other places where there's
legalised brothel prostitution or accepted brothel
prostitution, or tolerance zones, where it is much easier
to traffic women. Sweden has become a less favoured
destination for traffickers. Therefore there does seem to
be a model which is suited to decreasing trafficking and
that is prosecuting men for buying sexual services - the
women are not criminalised only the men are criminalised.

The Swedish example, I think, is often
very surprising to people because in Victoria we have been
led to believe that Australia, or at least Victoria is in
the forefront with very progressive liberal laws. It is
surprising to realise that there are countries in the
world which actively pursue women's equality by penalising
buyers instead of making their activities more comfortable
in legalised brothels. Sweden in terms of women's rights
and in terms of women's formal equality, is streets ahead
of Victoria.

So my suggestion to you is that, if we
want to deal with the trafficking in women we need to
think about what are the appropriate systems to adopt to
regulate prostitution that are consonant with that aim. If
the first cause of trafficking is prostitution, and the
first cause of prostitution is male privilege in the right
to buy and enter the bodies of women, then a good way
forward would be to treat men's abuse of women in
prostitution and their violence in prostitution in exactly
the same way in which we treat domestic violence in this
country. There should be education programs against it.
There should be education posters all round the cities of
Australia saying "this is a prostitution free zone" for
instance. There should be education in schools, to change
the way men think and the way they use women in
prostitution. Imagine this happening in this country.
Imagine the Labor Party in Australia having sufficient
commitment to the creation of women's equality to do what
the Social Democrats have done in Sweden and adopt a
policy of penalising the buyers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: SHEILA JEFFREYS is a
founding member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women Australia. She is an Associate Professor in
Political Science at the University of Melbourne. Email:
sheila@unimelb.edu.au. She is the author of The Idea
of Prostitution, Melbourne: Spinifex, 1997.

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